'The Australian Contemporary Theatre Company (ACTC) was resident at The Church Theatre from 1983 to 1989. The Church was an independent suburban venue, separate from the metropolitan theatres, and housed a season of works throughout the year, curated by the ACTC. Viewed in the context of the larger system of Melbourne theatre, the history of the ACTC demonstrates the value of a balance between large-scale, centralised, mainstream metropolitan arts centres and disparate, mid-sized suburban venues. During the 1980s, the presence of these companies and venues better enabled the kind of grassroots activity that fed the mainstage companies, gave crucial development time to emerging artists and artistic collaborations, and better integrated the performing arts into the wider community, encouraging ongoing engagement with new audiences.' (Publication abstract)

'Throughout the 1980s, a number of plays were produced in Melbourne which sat at the cutting edge of what was happening globally in site-specific practice at that time. Fefu and Her Friends (Maria Irene Forn, 1977) was produced in a house in Tennyson Street, Elwood, two years before Necessary Angel's celebrated house play, John Krizanc's Tamara, appeared at the Toronto Theatre Festival in 1981. Similarly, Bus, Son of Tram traversed the streets of inner Melbourne more than a decade before Forced Entertainment's much-lauded bus excursion, Nights in This City explored the suburbs of Sheffield in 1995. Described by Jack Hibberd as one of the most surreal events to animate Melbourne theatre, TheatreWorks' 'Tram Show', played to some 20,000 passengers, across 400 performances, generating (in today's figures) roughly $1 million at the box office - while trambulating a total distance that would have taken it halfway around the world. Bus, Son of Tram also became a recurring hit for the Banana Lounge's Rod Quantock and Geoff Brookes, who took their nightly audiences to police stations, private clubs, family planning clinics, the windows of expensive restaurants, and whatever city-wide events happened to be taking place at the time, which in February 1982 included the annual Moomba Festival.' (Publication abstract)

'This Round Table discussion occurred at a Symposium on Theatre in Melbourne in the 1980s, held at the University of Melbourne in September 2012. Peter Eckersall moderated a panel composed of Suzanne Chaundy, an associate director and dramaturg with Anthill; Patricia Cornelius, founding member of Melbourne Workers Theatre; Robert Draffin, member of The Mill Community Theatre Company and director of many productions at The Church; John Ellis, artistic director of The Church Theatre, 1983-89; Peter King, director of Adelaide Theatre Company and Going Through Stages; Bob Pavlich, founding member of Whistling in the Theatre; and Russell Walsh, theatre director and critic for various newspapers as well as New Theatre Australia in the 1980s. There are also questions and interjections from Tom Considine, member of The Mill Community Theatre Company and founding member of Five Dollar Theatre; Paul Davies, founding member of TheatreWorks; Julian Meyrick, artistic director of kickhouse theatre; Geoffrey Milne, lighting designer, reviewer and theatre historian; Jane Mullett, founding member of Circus Oz; and Meredith Rogers, member of The Mill Community Theatre Company and founding member of Home Cooking Theatre Company.' (Publication abstract)

'This article presents a general explanation of government subsidy to the arts, drawing on the historical experience of Australian alternative theatre from the late 1970s to the early 1990s - a period of expansion for the sector, but not for alternative theatre. It describes the strategic categories of measurement used by the country's major cultural provision agency at the time, the Australia Council, and presents an eightpart model showing how natural language terms - 'excellent', 'innovative', 'experimental', 'accessible', etc. - were taken up and repositioned as functional operators of capture by the peer assessment process. Using the structural analysis adopted by Ernesto Laclau in the ground-breaking On Populist Reason (2005), most especially his theory of the 'empty signifier' and its role in organising 'equivalential chains', or broad-based alliances of social demand, it suggests how Australian theatre was fractured, fragmented and recuperated by the competitive grant system. 'Difference', an effect of creative activity, was expropriated as the mark of its value, a saleable symbol in a world of increasingly symbolic commodities. With the consolidation of the Australia Council's dominance over the theatre sector during the period, difference could be fed back as market difference with the government as a 'corporate regulator'. While the rebarbative rhetoric of alternative artists might have remained the same, a creusant in Mallarme's sense had taken place, a hollowing-out - and a return to the values that so many of them were trying to rebel against.' (Publication abstract)

'Digital video archives, which are growing at an exponential rate, will become increasingly important to Theatre History and Performance Studies, and questions of how scholars negotiate the relationships between memory, technology and performance events in theoretical and practical terms will become crucial. Indeed, there is already a considerable body of scholarly material on this topic. This article considers these questions with specific reference to the relationship between video records deposited in digital archives and human memory. First and foremost, this article raises questions about the authority of the archive and the ways in which archival technologies, in the words of Maaike Bleeker, 'transform how we remember, how our and others' memories are entangled in the here-and-now, and, in the end, even how we think and imagine'.' (Publication abstract)

' 'Ned's is a bitch legend - wrong from the start - but Australia's in it - yes; something of a country where only eagles are fit to travel the skies, and men like eagles to ride it.' According to historian Manning Clark, these lines, spoken by the actor playing Joe Byrne in a production of Donald Stewart's Ned Kelly at the University of Melbourne in 1944, 'started me off on a great journey'. Forty years later, his compliment to the theatre was returned by Tim Robertson and Don Watson in their project to adapt Clark's massive, six-volume A History of Australia ('History') for the stage.' (Publication abstract)

'By the early 1960s, the Broken Hill Repertory Society came to be recognised - alongside the Barrier Industrial Unions' Band, the Philharmonic Society and the Quartette Club - as a pillar of the civic infrastructure, a testament to the vitality of the city's cultural life. Reporting on Broken Hill in 1963 for ABC Television's Four Corners, Frank Bennett profiled the recently constructed Repertory Playhouse as 'Broken Hill's biggest, best and newest cultural landmark' and acknowledged the financial support given by the mining companies, although his story was criticised by locals for not representing Broken Hill as a 'progressive' city and overlooking the range of cultural activities to be found there. With its repertoire of modern drama from London and New York, the Repertory's contributions to Broken Hill were accommodated within a broad mix of live entertainments, some imported, much locally produced, that sustained audiences into the 1960s.' (Publication abstract)

'The Broken Hill Repertory Society (BHRS) was established in 1944. Sixty-two years earlier, in 1883, the ore body which provided the base for the silver, lead and zinc mining industry in western New South Wales was discovered. The municipality of Broken Hill was incorporated in 1888, and the city developed over the decades with a dense and locally specific political, industrial and cultural fabric. The establishment of BHRS added a new element to that fabric, at a time when the city was experiencing a period of renewed industrial and civic expansion after World War II.' (Publication summary)